Diving into the good life

I have decided I don’t want to live to be 90.

I think the current pandemic cemented that knowledge in my head. I mean, I don’t want to pass away just right now — and maybe, with each passing year, I’ll want different things, my viewpoint might change, and just continuing living might eventually be enough for me.

But right now, I want to live large. Moderately large, maybe — on the lascivious side of moderation, for certain.

And I think that, though he died years ago, my father might have a role in that. Here’s why.

My dad was a bunch of things. He left the family farm in Rhode Island to become a U.S. army air corps medic at the tail end of the Second World War, became a chemist with funding from the G.I.

Bill, then worked as a chemist at places as varied as a chewing gum factory and a rayon mill before finding his lifelong pursuit, chemical oceanography. He knew hard times, and fought and thought his way to a good life.

He was also the most rational man I have ever known. He calculated everything, and was right when he did his math.

He believed in science, depended on cause and effect, and knew full well that he was not exempt from it.

Yet he also lived a life of flavour, richness and, yes, happy excess. His doctor always thought Dad was too heavy, that his blood pressure was too high, that he should cut back. But Dad loved smoked meats and pepperoni from his favourite Halifax deli, basked in fresh roasted coffee beans when the rest of Western World seeming to be living on the “miracle” of instant coffee, and could never resist red wine with dinner and later, in his big chair, a brandy or two. He revelled in rich food; he revelled in it in a lip-smacking, hearty way that sometimes repulsed teenaged me, a repulsion which now I regret.

He also knew, as clearly as night follows day, that there was a reckoning to be had for his bigger-than-life enjoyment of things.

He didn’t so much ignore that (sometimes he’d try to take his doctor’s advice, but would eventually slide back), but it certainly didn’t ever manage to successfully change his mind or manage his desires.

It was a mystery to me: how could a man who could professionally strip every scrap opinion and confusion away from the hard facts, who could see science with such clear eyes, still be almost a slave to so many basic passions? (I may not be explaining this well; when you’re talking about your parents, it’s always hard to admit they even had passions.)

He was unable to help himself.

I never knew why. Now, I do. (I sensed it before, for sure, but the enforced reflection of pandemic isolation really brings it home.)

Living involves, well, living. It’s not just lining up all the ducks in a row and seeing whose finish line marks the

“win” of the longest life.

Earlier this week, I wrote to a friend that, when the pandemic’s over, “I want to spend the rest of my days in an orgy of flavour and contact.”

Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe I’ll fall back into the same old routine of work and work.

One thing’s for sure: I don’t think that enough of us stop to think about just what it is we’re saving ourselves for.

But I’ve got some new steak sausages from a farm down in Haricot, and I’m heading down to the kitchen to testdrive those suckers right now. If Dad were here, I’d take out another fork.